Night moves

I talked to the chickadees on the way up the walk
Flirted with the hummingbird at the feeder until her man came and chased her home
Let a few far spaced rain drops talk me out of taking a short run
Guess I'll go to bed

William Hurt?

William Hurt was drunk in his sleeping bag talking. We were sheltering in a giant barn. The stalls were haphazardly filled with campers and sleeping farm animals. His stall was stage lit, and his drunken monologue started to sound more like performance. I walked up closer to hear better.

Then I woke up and read some of my book.

The traveler in South America on his bicycle had more visitors and made more friends in the 20 pages I read than I have had or made in five years. Part of the reason for this is dispositional. He is an extrovert: highly social, does not like being alone and takes action to avoid it. I'm an introvert: social to an extent but not much for groups, don't necessarily like being alone but prefer it to uncomfortable interaction. Being alone is not something I work to avoid and it is where I come to rest.

I started feeling lonely though. Fell back asleep in fits and starts dreaming various interactions with imaginary people. Putting a gift watch on someone's wrist. Talking with people.

In my own life, I can't pick up the phone. I stay home when I could visit.

Oh well. Time to go to work.

Dense

1. The cracked corn I put in the feeders attracted not only the squirrels and chipmunks but the crows too. One is drinking from the birdbath now, standing ankle deep.

Yesterday, I watched a crow washing it's wings in there. Another used the water to clean and tenderize something crimson, the color of a fresh kill.

Since then an intrusive thought persists. Was it a young bird? The toddler of one of the song birds I've been supporting? I saw no beak or birdish feet, and I looked for them, believe me.

A lesson wants to emerge and slap me around. Something about the claw and fang of nature lurking behind my romantic ideals. About the clueless privilege and inefficacy of intention and well-wishing. The misguided malice inherent in intervention.

But it doesn't quite come through.

2. Hey, is it okay that I'm sick of us?

You're Wanting It To Go This Way

Precious and few indeed

'Cause if I can't find my way back home
It just wouldn't be fair
Precious and few are the moments we two can share

In my dream, I sang the whole song while swinging gently from tree to tree the entire length of a city park. I'd been walking and noticed that when I leapt I stayed in the air a little longer than gravity typically allows and that I came back to earth slowly as if filled with helium. Soon I was leaping slowly up into trees, using my hands on the branches to propel me forward, up or down. I glided above the business people singing.

Many of the tree trunks were riddled with holes placed by woodpeckers in interesting patterns. There seemed to be meaning there, but I could not yet decipher it.

There was much I hadn't understood before I learned to leap.  Now, things were being revealed.

I was floating high above, nearly flying. The District Attorney was acting silly in her office. She didn't know I was there. She was quirky, maybe a little crazy. I knew I'd be able to work with her. I was feeling at ease.

Precious and few are the moments we two can share
Lying in blue like the sky I'm hung over you

Place holder

Day off tomorrow to take care of neglected things. 

99

At dusk, a small bird drinks from the bird bath I bought in the Spring.

I haven't been lonely during this social distancing even though I live alone. But I felt something like it tonight.

I went out to eat at a just re-opened restaurant at around 7:30 pm on my way home from work. The masked waitress handed me a photocopied paper menu, stood at a safe distance, and told me I was only the third customer of the night.

I ate my meal looking out the window at the empty parking lot. Only after I'd finished (in about seven minutes) did I realize I had not gotten the meal I'd ordered.

And then I don't

Thinking about reaching out and then I don't. You're a pussy, a female friend said. Is that what it is? Fear? 

Leaving

Get your fucking taxes done already

Make me a star chart and give me credit for climbing out of bed, taking a shower, and getting overwhelmed before noon.

I'm sick with something happening to the country. No longer well enough to pretend that it isn't or that time will correct our course.

All the voices in me are shouting, whispering, weeping, laughing different things.

Settle down and take the next step forward.

Instead, I decide to read a few pages in the book I am reading about a young man riding his bicycle to Patagonia from Oregon. I get through a paragraph about his father brooding at Christmas and am distracted.

I associated his with the Kennedy tragedies. That's how my grandmother spoke of - and endlessly wept for - him.

Like them, he was bright, charismatic, handsome, and Irish. He also died young - tragically, senselessly. And I was that brave boy in the Life Magazine photograph saluting the motorcade from the street corner.

I step backward, out of his reach, reflexively after he slapped my face. Why he did so, I can't be sure.

It was like being attacked by a friendly dog. The sudden ferocity in his face. What's wrong with me?

Distractedly I play a song on my computer, now, in the present. And though it's not exactly the same - its tempo is slow, there's a horn and no human voices. It brought me to that ritual space. Lilac scent, candles, the heavy rhythm of my heart. You.

And then I jumped right back into that feeling of the world being lost and the matters at hand. 

Dementia

She first couldn't find the words.
When she seemed to find them, she couldn't speak them.
Just stammered nonsense sounds until,

"I can't but I want you to know that I'm trying."

Day

Went to bed just after dark last night. The morning light woke me just now, at 6:31. My youngest son graduates, virtually, from middle school today. The girl at the Dunkin Donuts told me Monday she'd be there again today. Two men will be discharged from the psychiatric hospital to some place less restrictive. Two men will replace them, needing some place more so. 

It's not looking that good for you

We adapt to just about anything. I've been driving to work at about 85 miles an hour down the highway portions of the route for the last month. No stopping and starting. No sitting and waiting. No being cut off, stuck behind some moron staring at a phone screen instead of actually driving with a purpose. No accidents.

Traffic is less than 50% of what it was prior to the pandemic moving in.

The adaptation I'm speaking of is in regard to road rage. Mine hasn't disappeared with the traffic, as one might reasonably hypothesize. Now it only requires the inconvenience of having to tap the brakes to set it off.

Sleeper

What's with all the sleeping? I used to sleep in the driver's seat of my car in parking lots between night and day jobs, sometimes getting by on just an hour of it. Granted, I was not functioning highly, but I was in motion. Now I'm often in bed when it gets dark and have trouble getting up 8 to 10 hours later. I think I could sleep twelve hours a day every day without effort.

This morning I dreamed of being on a cruise ship and waiting for the impact of something. Talking with the other people about the best way to survive whatever we were waiting for, and having no real idea. I was riffing on how naive people look just before disaster strikes. 

One kind of medicine

His memory is going, but he remembers his wife dying of cancer and his two then young children crying for her.

He is crying for them all now. He tells me he's sorry. He's trying not to.

I tell him crying is part of healing, to just let it happen. He does. 

Ghostly college town Sunday afternoon

A stiffened sparrow lies dead before a window reflecting a teenager and a white-haired man eating Chinese at a picnic table. The sky is a bright blue and there are no other people to be seen.

Dream

1.   A day's work comes in from the warehouse, and I'm glad to go. The money is good and necessary, and I'm wondering how the people I started to get to know back in April are doing.

Maria is there. I spot her immediately. She touches her heart when she sees me, and I do the same. Her eyes are smiling above her mask. She is still disinfecting everything all day.

We try to communicate in our respective languages.

Enfermo? 

No, no...y tu? 

No!

Gracias a Dios!

I want to put her in a house. Give her a pool to sit beside. A cool tropical drink to sip.
Leisure and nothing to worry about. But I don't have these things.

2.   When the initial excitement fades, I find myself thinking about what it would be like to enter the day to day of someone else's world again. To allow someone else into the tangle of mine. The idea makes me pessimistic. I open a book and start to read. 

Perky

Maybe you could call it a perky affluence. I saw you two standing close together at the starting line about to run a half marathon. I was doing the whole thing and bleeding there of jealousy. After about seven miles my calves locked up and forced me to walk. Then they'd relax, and I'd run 50 or 100 steps, and they'd cramp again. All that time I was imagining the two of you laughing, joking, loving, running comfortably with perfect form all the way through to your achievement. While I was left to labor joylessly and drag my miserable ass through to the very bitter end. 

Recruit Cozart

We were in recruit training on Parris Island in South Carolina. Recruit Cozart was the platoon's Protestant lay leader. He was a dark skinned country boy from Mississippi about 18 years old. His job was to advocate for us before God just before the lights went out.

In the beginning, I couldn't understand many of the words he said. Only Jesus, Lord, God, please, help us and thank you. Cozart prayed in earnest. Sometimes tears streamed down his face. Sometimes he beamed a smile like he was talking to his grandma who loved him more than anything in the whole world. He was not ashamed. He was always humble. When he prayed for us, his heart showed.

I didn't believe much in whoever he was talking to. But I came to believe in Cozart.

After midnight

A nightmare of screaming in some kind of temple, feeling in danger of losing my mind. My screams summon an Asian man with a flashlight who says he is sorry that I was left alone in such a state. 

Sunday in the park

All three kids in the same place on a sunny Sunday afternoon. We were throwing a frisbee together. There was a girl watching from the mouth of something that looked like a cave in the shade of a small grove of trees. It seemed to me like she wanted to join us.

I approached her after awhile. My daughter looked warily at my older son. I told the young woman that I felt like I should approach respectfully with a question. I told her she looked like an oracle. She told me she reads oracle cards. I asked if she'd like to join us. And she did.

8:46

I attended another protest Saturday. This one was organized by students. One of them asked us to take a knee and observe silence for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. That's the length of time a police officer kneeled on George Floyd's neck - even though Mr. Floyd was prone, had his hands cuffed behind his back, and was offering no resistance.

Eight minutes and forty-six seconds is long enough to become uncomfortable on one knee. It's also plenty long enough for your rage to cool; for good judgment to return; to realize what you're doing is a bad idea; for your buddies to intervene; to hear a man pleading for his life and for empathy and mercy to kick in. There was plenty of time for these things to occur, but they didn't. Instead a man's life drained out under the knee and in the presence of the people's sworn protectors.

Eight minutes and forty-six seconds is time enough to change your heart. 

Agenda

Green humid morning and all has gone to jungle. The squirrels chewed through the duct tape and have defeated the baffle. I'm already tired thinking about adopting a mentality of war against them. No need for that - there's nothing to lose or gain. I'm going to take a trip to the laundromat while it's still early. Taxes need to get done. Delivery driving tonight. Other than that, a day of quiet in here. It's welcome.

Bear it

6:45 AM about a half mile from my house and headed for work, I came upon an adult black bear sitting on the roadside. This is a sight I'd never seen before, but it didn't strike me as any stranger than anything else I'd witnessed lately. I pulled up beside him, leaving a respectful distance, and rolled down the window. "You ok, Pal?" I asked. There was irritability and confusion in those eyes. I imagine he/she saw about the same in mine. 

Haircut

"China did this to us," said the barber. Not the one cutting my hair, but her friend, a safe distance over. "If it's all not just a conspiracy."

I smirked at first, thinking she was being sarcastic, but she wasn't. "Who eats bats anyway?"

My haircut ended up being a poor one, but I tipped her well for coming to work in the face of the danger this damn Chinese or Democrat bug presents. I should have cut my own damn hair.

Now it's back to voluntary quarantine far more than just a social distance from the rest of them. Our collective American head is half-full of shit.

Fox and Friends have fucked us up but good. 

Free assembly

Last night there was a protest, and the people came together. They chanted, and filmed, and held signs, and posed for pictures. Police stood by, mostly out of sight, except for the two surveillance drones up high over Main Street.

The people marched from City Hall to the courthouse without breaking or burning things. The young ones chanted No Justice, No Peace and I Can't Breathe and Hands Up, Don't Shoot. The sound system played Fight The Power and Fuck The Police. Three of the protest speakers and organizers were people I've known and worked with over the years, fully formed leaders now.

I clapped, walked along, chanted quietly - but not much - watched, listened and got home by sunset. This morning the city still stands. Some would say that this was too tame and more is called for, but I'm glad the city didn't burn and people weren't harmed. I saw small children in the crowd, people of all kinds, and I worried for them. I walked past a police officer manning a street crossing, alone, telling passers by it was going to be alright.